The Etiquette of Hashtagging
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9pm, Thursday March 5th, 2009Comment
Tags: twitter, web
A few days ago on Twitter, I wrote this:
Hashtags are "a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets." To see what I mean about normal words being tagged, go to search.twitter.com, pick a random word and put a hash sign in front of it.
Updates like this annoy me, because there’s absolutely no need to tag normal words in a tweet. For every person on Twitter who’s versed in all things #, there are many more who haven’t had the trend explained to them. This means there are people tweeting both "#episode" and "episode", so we’ve got two terms that need to be searched for to find tweets relating to TV.
I’ve seen some nice Twitter guidelines in the last couple of weeks (some on corporate usage spring to mind), so I thought I’d have a go at some for hashtagging…
When should I tag?
There are a couple of things in this category:
- When at an event, or a gathering of people – or trying to keep track of an event. Future of Web Apps and The Pirate Bay’s trial are two that have worked quite well in the past.
- When Twitter’s search might not give proper results for a phrase. #safari4 was one from yesterday, as I suppose “Safari 4″ could give some strange results.
And when should I not?
Essentially…
My name’s Alex Muller.
Like anything, there are legitimate and non legitimate uses for hashtags. I can understand someone not wanting you to tag every word in a tweet or use tags that are irrelevant to the tweet’s content. However, I personally like the idea of hash tags making it easier to target a particular audience, even if the content of the tweet is more “headline” like than a bunch of keywords. Obviously, it’s obnoxious if someone is tagging tweets with words that are popular trending topics just to get the tweets picked up, but I feel it’s legitimate to use them to “categorize” the content if keywords are not present in the tweet itself.